[RPG] the significance of the errata that removed the Artillerist artificer’s Eldritch Cannon’s immunity to conditions

artificerconditionsdnd-5eerrataimmunities

When Eberron: Rising from the Last War was published in November 2019, the version of the Artillerist artificer published in it originally contained this line (p. 59):

It is immune to poison damage, psychic damage, and all conditions.

However, the artificer class (including this subclass) was updated and republished in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, and E:RftLW received errata to match the TCoE version.
The November 2020 errata document for E:RftLW modified this line of the Artillerist artificer's Eldritch Cannon feature to remove the last part of the quoted sentence, so it now reads:

It is immune to poison damage and psychic damage.

I feel like I may be missing something here.

Is an Eldritch Cannon now eligible to be subject to some or all conditions? Or was the errata just removing a redundant statement, because the cannon already immune to all conditions by virtue of being an object (rather than a creature)?

To ask another way:
Are there any rules interactions that are changed because of the removal of the text that explicitly afforded condition immunity to the cannon?

Best Answer

I don't think this change affected anything, since conditions only affect creatures.

The intro to "Appendix A: Conditions" in the PHB/basic rules begins with this sentence (emphasis mine):

Conditions alter a creature’s capabilities in a variety of ways and can arise as a result of a spell, a class feature, a monster’s attack, or other effect.

The description of the Artillerist artificer's Eldritch Cannon feature states, in part (Eberron: Rising from the Last War, p. 59):

The cannon is a magical object.

Conditions can only affect creatures, not objects. Hence, the cannon could not be affected by conditions even before the erratum, and the clause "and all conditions" was at least superfluous, if not problematic (as people could misconstrue it's existence to imply that other objects could be affected by conditions -- thanks to @DarthPseudonym for pointing this out).